Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775–1854) is, along
with J.G. Fichte and G.W.F. Hegel, one of the three most influential
thinkers in the tradition of ‘German Idealism’. Although
he is often regarded as a philosophical Proteus who changed his
conception so radically and so often that it is hard to attribute one
clear philosophical conception to him, Schelling was in fact often an
impressively rigorous logical thinker. In the era during which
Schelling was writing, so much was changing in philosophy that a
stable, fixed point of view was as likely to lead to a failure to
grasp important new developments as it was to lead to a defensible
philosophical system. Schelling's continuing importance today relates
mainly to three aspects of his work. The first is
his Naturphilosophie, which, although its empirical claims are
largely indefensible, opens up the possibility of a modern hermeneutic
view of nature that does not restrict nature's significance to what
can be established about it in scientific terms. The second is his
anti-Cartesian account of subjectivity, which prefigures some of the
best ideas of thinkers like Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Jacques Lacan,
in showing how the thinking subject cannot be fully transparent to
itself. The third is his later critique of Hegelian Idealism, which
influenced Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and others, and
aspects of which are still echoed in contemporary thought by thinkers
like Jacques Derrida.

Schelling was born in Leonberg near Stuttgart on 27 January 1775. He
attended a Protestant seminary in Tübingen from 1790 to 1795,
where he was close friends with both Hegel and the poet and philosopher
Friedrich Hölderlin. He moved to Leipzig in 1797, then to Jena,
where he came into contact with the early Romantic thinkers, Friedrich
Schlegel and Novalis, and, via Goethe's influence, took up his first
professorship from 1798 to 1803. From 1803 to 1806 he lived in
Würzburg, whence he left for Munich, where he mainly lived from
1806 onwards, with an interruption from 1820 to 1827, when he lived in
Erlangen. He moved to Berlin in 1841 to take up what had, until Hegel's
death in 1831, been Hegel's chair of philosophy. Although his lectures
in Berlin were initially attended by such luminaries as Kierkegaard,
Engels, Bakunin, Ranke, Burkhardt, and Alexander von Humboldt, he soon
came to be largely ignored by most of the leading thinkers of the day.
It is clear, however, that his philosophical thought still influenced
many who rejected him on mainly political grounds. He died on 20 August
1854 in Bad Ragaz, Switzerland. Schelling's influence on many
directions in modern philosophy has been seriously underestimated in
the English-speaking world, though this underestimation is now
beginning to be countered by renewed attention to his work.

The significance of the work of the early Schelling (1795–1800) lies
in its attempts to give a new account of nature which, while taking
account of the fact that Kant had irrevocably changed the status of
nature in modern philosophy, avoids some of the consequences of Kant's
theory that were seen as problematic by Kant's contemporaries and
successors. For the Kant of the Critique of Pure Reason
(1781, 1787) nature is largely seen in the ‘formal’ sense:
nature is that which is subject to necessary laws. These laws are
accessible to us, Kant argues, because cognition depends on the
subject bringing necessary forms of thought, the categories, to bear
on what it perceives. The problem this leads to is how the subject
could fit into a nature conceived of in deterministic terms, given
that the subject's ability to know is dependent upon its
‘spontaneous’ self-caused ability to judge in terms of the
categories. Kant's response to this dilemma is to split the
‘sensuous’ realm of nature as law-bound appearance from
the ‘intelligible’ realm of the subject's cognitive and
ethical self-determination. However, if the subject is part of nature
there would seem to be no way of explaining how a nature which we can
only know as deterministic can give rise to a subject which
seems to transcend determinism in its knowing and in its ethical
doings. Kant himself sought to bridge the realms of necessity and
spontaneity in the Critique of Judgement (1790), by
suggesting that nature itself could be seen in more than formal terms:
it also produces self-determining organisms and can give rise to
disinterested aesthetic pleasure in the subject that contemplates its
forms. The essential problems remained, however, that (1) Kant gave no
account of the genesis of the subject that transcends its status as a
piece of determined nature, and (2) such an account would have to be
able to bridge the divide between nature and freedom.

The tensions in Schelling's philosophy of this period, which set the
agenda for most of his subsequent work, derive, then, from the need to
overcome the perceived lack in Kant's philosophy of a substantial
account of how nature and freedom come to co-exist. Two ways out of
Kantian dualism immediately suggested themselves to thinkers in the
1780s and 90s. On the one hand, Kant's arguments about the division
between appearances and things in themselves, which gave rise to the
problem of how something ‘in itself’ could give rise to
appearances for the subject, might be overcome by rejecting the notion
of the thing in itself altogether. If what we know of the object is the
product of the spontaneity of the I, an Idealist could argue that the
whole of the world's intelligibility is therefore the result of the
activity of the subject, and that a new account of subjectivity is
required which would achieve what Kant had failed to achieve. On the
other hand, the fact that nature gives rise to self-determining
subjectivity would seem to suggest that a monist account of a nature
which was more than a concatenation of laws, and was in some sense
inherently ‘subjective’, would offer a different way of
accounting for what Kant's conception did not provide. Schelling seeks
answers to the Kantian problems in terms that relate to both these
conceptions. Indeed, it is possible to argue that the conceptions are
in one sense potentially identical: if the essence of nature is that it
produces the subjectivity which enables it to understand itself, nature
itself could be construed as a kind of ‘super-subject’. The
main thinkers whose work embodies these alternatives are J.G.
Fichte, and Spinoza.

The source of Schelling's concern with Spinoza is the
‘Pantheism controversy’, which brought Spinoza's monism
into the mainstream of German philosophy. In 1783 the writer and
philosopher F.H. Jacobi became involved in an influential dispute with
the Berlin Enlightenment philosopher Moses Mendelssohn over the claim
that G.E. Lessing had admitted to being a Spinozist, an admission which
at that time was tantamount to the admission of atheism, with all the
dangerous political and other consequences that entailed. In his On
the Doctrine of Spinoza in Letters to Herr Moses Mendelssohn,
(1785, second edition 1789), which was influenced by his reading of
Kant's first Critique, Jacobi revealed a problem which would
recur in differing ways throughout Schelling's work. Jacobi's
interpretation of Spinozism was concerned with the relationship between
what he termed the ‘unconditioned’ and the
‘conditioned’, between God as the ground of which the laws
of nature are the consequent, and the linked chains of the
deterministic laws of nature. Cognitive explanation relies, as Kant
suggested, upon finding a thing's ‘condition’. Jacobi's
question is how finding a thing's condition can finally ground its
explanation, given that each explanation leads to a regress in which
each condition depends upon another condition ad infinitum.
Any philosophical system that would ground the explanation of a part of
nature thus “necessarily ends by having to discover
conditions of the unconditioned” (Scholz, ed.,
1916, p. 51). For Jacobi this led to the need for a theological leap
of faith, as the world's intelligibility otherwise threatened to
become a mere illusion, in which nothing was finally grounded at
all. In the 1787 Introduction to the first Critique Kant
maintains this problem of cognitive grounding can be overcome by
acknowledging that, while reason must postulate the
“unconditioned (…) in all things in themselves for
everything conditioned, so that the series of conditions should thus
become complete” (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason B,
p. XX), by restricting knowledge to appearances, rather than allowing
it to be of “things in themselves”, the contradiction of
seeking conditions of the unconditioned can be avoided. As we have
already seen, though, this gives rise precisely to the problem of how
a subject which is not conditioned like the nature it comes to know
can emerge as the ground of knowledge from nature.

The condition of the knowledge of appearances for Kant is the
‘transcendental subject’, but what sort of
‘condition’ is the transcendental subject? The perception
that Kant has no proper answer to this problem initially unites
Schelling and Fichte. Fichte insists in
the Wissenschaftslehre (1794) that the unconditioned status
of the I has to be established if Kant's system is to legitimate
itself. He asserts that “It is (…) the ground of
explanation of all facts of empirical consciousness that before all
positing in the I the I itself must previously be posited”
(Fichte 1971, p. 95), thereby giving the I the founding role which he
thought Kant had failed adequately to explicate. Fichte does this by
extending the consequences of Kant's claim that the cognitive activity
of the I, via which it can reflect upon itself, cannot be
understood as part of the causal world of appearances, and must
therefore be part of the noumenal realm, the realm of the
‘unconditioned’. For Fichte the very fact of philosophy's
existence depends upon the free act of the I which initiates the
reflective questioning of its own activity by the I.

Schelling takes up the issues raised by Jacobi and Fichte in two texts
of 1795: Of the I as Principle of Philosophy or on the
Unconditional in Human Knowledge, and Philosophical Letters
on Dogmatism and Criticism. In a move which prefigures aspects of
Heidegger's questioning of the notion of being, he reinterprets Kant's
question as to the condition of possibility of synthetic judgements a
priori as a question about why there is a realm of judgements, a
manifest world requiring syntheses by the subject for knowledge to be
produced, at all. In Of the I, Schelling puts Kant's question
in Fichtean terms: “how is it that the absolute I goes out of
itself and opposes a Not-I to itself?” (Sämmtliche
Werke [SW], I/1, p. 175). He maintains that the condition
of knowledge, the ‘positing’ by the I of that which is
opposed to it, must have a different status from the determined realm
which it posits: “nothing can be posited by itself as a thing,
i.e. an absolute/unconditioned thing (unbedingtes Ding) is a
contradiction” (ibid., p. 116). However, his key worry about
Fichte's position already becomes apparent in the
Philosophical Letters, where he drops the Fichtean
terminology: “How is it that I step at all out of the
absolute and move towards something opposed (auf ein
Entgegengesetztes)?” (ibid., p. 294). The problem
Schelling confronts was identified by his friend Hölderlin, in
the light of Jacobi's formulation of the problem of the
‘unconditioned’. Fichte wished to understand the absolute
as an I in order to avoid the problem of nature ‘in
itself’ which creates Kantian dualism. For something to be an I,
though, it must be conscious of an other, and thus in a relationship
to that other. The overall structure of the relationship could not,
therefore, be described from only one side of that
relationship. Hölderlin argued that one has to understand the
structure of the relationship of subject to object in consciousness as
grounded in ‘a whole of which subject and object are the
parts’, which he termed ‘being’. This idea will be
vital to Schelling at various times in his philosophy.

In the 1790s, then, Schelling is seeking a way of coming to terms with
the ground of the subject's relationship to the object world. His aim
is to avoid the fatalist consequences of Spinoza's system by taking on
key aspects of Kant's and Fichte's transcendental philosophy, and yet
not to fall into the trap Hölderlin identified in Fichte's
conception of an absolute I. In his Naturphilosophie
(philosophy of nature), which emerges in 1797 and develops in the
succeeding years, and in the System of Transcendental
Idealism of 1800, Schelling wavers between a Spinozist and a
Fichtean approach to the ‘unconditioned’. In
the Naturphilosophie the Kantian division between appearing
nature and nature in itself is seen as resulting from the fact that
the nature theorised in cognitive judgements is objectified in
opposition to the knowing subject. This objectification, the result of
the natural sciences' search for fixed laws, fails to account for the
living dynamic forces in nature, including those in our own organism,
with which Kant himself became concerned in the
third Critique and other late work, and which had played a
role in Leibniz's account of nature. Nature in itself is thought of by
Schelling as a ‘productivity’: “As the object
[qua ‘conditioned condition’] is never
absolute/unconditioned (unbedingt) then something per se
non-objective must be posited in nature; this absolutely non-objective
postulate is precisely the original productivity of nature” (SW
I/3, p. 284). The Kantian dualism between things in themselves and
appearances is a result of the fact that the productivity can never
appear as itself and can only appear in the form of
‘products’, which are the productivity
‘inhibiting’ itself. The products are never complete in
themselves: they are like the eddies in a stream, which temporarily
keep their shape via the resistance of the movement of the fluid to
itself that creates them, despite the changing material flowing
through them.

Schelling next tries to use the insights of transcendental
philosophy, while still avoiding Kant's dualism, to explain our
knowledge of nature. The vital point is that things in themselves and
‘representations’ cannot be absolutely different because we
know a world which exists independently of our will which can yet be
affected by our will:

one can push as many transitory materials as one wants,
which become finer and finer, between mind and matter, but sometime the
point must come where mind and matter are One, or where the great leap
that we so long wished to avoid becomes inevitable. (SW I/2, p. 53)

The Naturphilosophie includes ourselves within nature, as
part of an interrelated whole, which is structured in an ascending
series of ‘potentials’ that contain a polar opposition
within themselves. The model is a magnet, whose opposing poles are
inseparable from each other, even though they are opposites. As
productivity nature cannot be conceived of as an object, since it is
the subject of all possible real ‘predicates’, of the
‘eddies’ of which transient, objective nature consists.
However, nature's ‘inhibiting’ itself in order to become
something determinate means that the ‘principle of all
explanation of nature’ is ‘universal duality’, an
inherent difference of subject and object which prevents nature ever
finally reaching stasis (SW I/3, p. 277). At the same time this
difference of subject and object must be grounded in an identity which
links them together, otherwise all the problems of dualism would just
reappear. In a decisive move for German Idealism, Schelling parallels
the idea of nature as an absolute producing subject, whose predicates
are appearing objective nature, with the spontaneity of the thinking
subject, which is the condition of the syntheses required for the
constitution of objectivity, thus for the possibility of predication
in judgements. The problem for Schelling lies in explicating how these
two subjects relate to each other.

In the System of Transcendental Idealism Schelling goes
back to Fichtean terminology, though he will soon abandon most of it.
He endeavours to explain the emergence of the thinking subject from
nature in terms of an ‘absolute I’ coming retrospectively
to know itself in a ‘history of self-consciousness’ that
forms the material of the system. The System recounts the
history of which the transcendental subject is the result. A version of
the model Schelling establishes will be adopted by Hegel in the
Phenomenology of Mind. Schelling presents the process in
terms of the initially undivided I splitting itself in order to
articulate itself in the syntheses, the ‘products’, which
constitute the world of knowable nature. The founding stages of this
process, which bring the world of material nature into being, are
‘unconscious’. These stages then lead to organic nature,
and thence to consciousness and self-consciousness. Schelling claims,
in the wake of Fichte, that the resistance of the noumenal realm to
theoretical knowledge results from the fact that “the
[practical] act [of the absolute I] via which all limitation is
posited, as condition of all consciousness, does not itself come to
consciousness” (SW I/3, p. 409). He prophetically attempts to
articulate a theory which comes to terms with the idea that thought is
driven by forces which are not finally transparent to it, of the kind
later to become familiar in psychoanalysis. How, though, does one gain
access by thought to what cannot be an object of consciousness? This
access is crucial to the whole project because without it there can be
no understanding of why the move from determined nature to the freedom
of self-determining thinking takes place at all.

Schelling adopts the idea from the early Romantic thinkers Friedrich
Schlegel and Novalis, whom he knew in Jena at this time, that art is
the route to an understanding of what cannot appear as an object of
knowledge. Philosophy cannot represent nature in itself because access
to the sphere of the unconscious must be via what appears to
consciousness in the realm of theoretical knowledge. The work of art
is evidently an empirical, appearing object like any other, but if it
is not more than what it is qua determinable object it cannot
be a work of art, because this requires both the free judgement of the
subject and the object's conveying of something beyond its objective
nature. Although the System's own very existence depends upon
the transition from theoretical to practical philosophy, which
requires the breaking-off of Jacobi's chain of
‘conditions’ by something unconditioned, Schelling is
concerned to understand how the highest insight must be into reality
as a product of the interrelation of both the ‘conscious’
and the ‘unconscious’. Reality is not, therefore,
essentially captured by a re-presentation of the objective by the
subjective. Whereas in the System nature begins unconsciously
and ends in conscious philosophical and scientific knowledge, in the
art work: “the I is conscious according to the production,
unconscious with regard to the product” (SW I/3, p. 613). The
product cannot be understood via the intentions of its producer, as
this would mean that it became a ‘conditioned’ object,
something produced in terms of a pre-existing rule, and would
therefore lack what makes mere craft into art. Art is, then,
“the only true and eternal organ and document of philosophy,
which always and continuously documents what philosophy cannot
represent externally” (ibid., p. 627). The particular
sciences can only follow the chain of conditions, via the principle of
sufficient reason, and must determine any object via its place in that
chain, a process which has no necessary end. The art object, on the
other hand, manifests what cannot be understood in terms of its
knowable conditions, because an account of the materials of which it
is made or of its status as object in the world does not constitute it
as art. Art shows what cannot be said. Philosophy cannot positively
represent the absolute because ‘conscious’ thinking
operates from the position where the ‘absolute identity’
of the subjective and the objective has always already been lost in
the emergence of consciousness.

Although Schelling's early work did not fully satisfy either
himself, or anybody else, it manages to address, in a cogent and
illuminating fashion, many topics which affect subsequent
philosophy. The model presented in the System impresses not
least because, at the same time as establishing the notion of the
history of self-consciousness that would be decisive for Hegel, it
offers, in a manner which goes beyond its sources in Fichte, a model of
the relationship between the subject and its conceptually inaccessible
motivating forces which would affect significant parts of nineteenth
century thought from Schopenhauer, to Nietzsche, to Freud.

Although the period of Schelling's ‘identity philosophy’
is usually dated from the 1801 Presentation of My System of
Philosophy until sometime before the 1809 On the Essence of
Human Freedom, the project of that philosophy can be said to be
carried on in differing ways throughout his work. The identity
philosophy derives from Schelling's conviction that the self-conscious
I must be seen as a result, rather than as the originating act it is in
Fichte, and thus that the I cannot be seen as the generative matrix of
the whole system. This takes him more in the direction of Spinoza, but
the problem is still that of articulating the relationship between the
I and the world of material nature, without either reverting to Kantian
dualism or failing to explain how a purely objective nature could give
rise to subjectivity.

Schelling's mature identity philosophy, which is contained in the
System of the Whole of Philosophy and of Naturphilosophie in
Particular, written in Würzburg in 1804, and in other texts
between 1804 and 1807, breaks with the model of truth as
correspondence. It does so because:

It is clear that in every explanation of the truth as a
correspondence (Übereinstimmung) of subjectivity and
objectivity in knowledge, both, subject and object, are already
presupposed as separate, for only what is different can agree, what is
not different is in itself one. (SW I/6, p. 138)

The crucial problem is how to explain the link between the
subject and object world that makes judgements possible, and this
cannot be achieved in terms of how a subject can have thoughts which
correspond to an object essentially separate from it. For there to be
judgements at all what is split and then synthesised in the judgement
must, Schelling contends, in some way already be the same. This has
often been understood as leading Schelling to a philosophy in which,
as Hegel puts it in the Phenomenology, the absolute is the
‘night in which all cows are black’, because it swallows
all differentiated knowledge in the assertion that everything is
ultimately the same, namely an absolute which excludes all relativity
from itself and thus becomes inarticulable. This is not a valid
interpretation of Schelling's argument. In an early version of the
identity philosophy he had said the following:

For most people see in the essence of the Absolute nothing
but pure night and cannot recognise anything in it; it shrinks before
them into a mere negation of difference, and is for them something
purely privative, whence they cleverly make it into the end of their
philosophy (…) I want to show here (…) how that night of
the Absolute can be turned into day for knowledge (SW I/4,
p. 403).

In order to try to get over the problem in monism of how the One is
also the many, Schelling, following the idea outlined above from
Hölderlin, introduces a notion of ‘transitive’ being,
which links mind and matter as predicates of itself. Schelling explains
this ‘transitivity’ via the metaphor of the earth:

you recognise its [the earth's] true essence only in the
link by which it eternally posits its unity as the multiplicity of its
things and again posits this multiplicity as its unity. You also do not
imagine that, apart from this infinity of things which are in it, there
is another earth which is the unity of these things, rather the
same which is the multiplicity is also unity, and what
the unity is, is also the multiplicity, and this necessary and
indissoluble One of unity and multiplicity in it is what you call its
existence (…) Existence is the link of a being (Wesen) as
One, with itself as a multiplicity. (SW I/7, p. 56)

‘Absolute identity’ is, then, the link of the
two aspects of being, which, on the one hand, is the universe,
and, on the other, is the changing multiplicity which the
knowable universe also is. Schelling insists now that “The
I think, I am, is, since Descartes, the basic
mistake of all knowledge; thinking is not my thinking, and being is
not my being, for everything is only of God or the totality” (SW
I/7, p. 148), so the I is ‘affirmed’ as a predicate of the
being by which it is preceded. In consequence he already begins to
move away, albeit inconsistently, from the German Idealist model in
which the intelligibility of being is regarded as a result of its
having an essentially mind-like structure.

Schelling is led to this view by his understanding of the changing and
relative status of theoretical knowledge. It is the inherent
incompleteness of all finite determinations which reveals the nature
of the absolute. His description of time makes clear what he means:
“time is itself nothing but the totality appearing in
opposition to the particular life of things”, so that the
totality “posits or intuits itself, by not positing, not
intuiting the particular” (SW I/6, p. 220). The particular is
determined in judgements, but the truth of claims about the totality
cannot be proven because judgements are necessarily conditioned,
whereas the totality is not. Given the relative status of the
particular there must, though, be a ground which enables us to
be aware of that relativity, and this ground must have a
different status from the knowable world of finite particulars. At the
same time, if the ground were wholly different from the world of
relative particulars the problems of dualism would recur. As such the
absolute is the finite, but we do not know this in
the manner we know the finite. Without the presupposition of
‘absolute identity’, therefore, the evident relativity of
particular knowledge becomes inexplicable, since there would be no
reason to claim that a revised judgement is predicated of the same
world as the preceding — now false — judgement.

Schelling summarises his theory of identity as follows:

for being, actual, real being is precisely
self-disclosure/revelation (Selbstoffenbarung). If it is to
be as One then it must disclose/reveal itself in itself; but it does
not disclose/reveal itself in itself if it is not an other in itself,
and is in this other the One for itself, thus if it is not
absolutely the living link of itself and an other. (SW I/7,
p. 54)

The link between the ‘real’ and the ‘ideal’
cannot be regarded as a causal link. Although there cannot be mental
events without physical events, the former cannot be reduced to being
the causal results of the latter: “For real and ideal are only
different views of one and the same substance” (SW I/6,
p. 501). Schelling wavers at this time between a
‘reflexive’ position of the kind which Hegel will soon try
to articulate, in which, in Schelling's terms, “the sameness of
the subjective and the objective is made the same as itself, knows
itself, and is the subject and object of itself” (SW I/6,
p. 173), in the ‘identity of identity and difference’, and
the sense that this position cannot finally circumscribe the structure
of the absolute. The structure of reflection, where each aspect
reflects itself and then is reflected in the other, upon which this
account of the identity of subject and object relies, must be grounded
in a being which carries it:

reflection (…) only knows the universal and the
particular as two relative negations, the universal as relative
negation of the particular, which is, as such, without reality, the
particular, on the other hand, as a relative negation of the
universal. (…) something independent of the concept must be
added to posit the substance as such. (SW I/6, p. 185)

Without this independent basis subject and object would merely be, as
Schelling thinks they are in Fichte, relative negations of each other,
leading to a circle “inside which a nothing gains reality by the
relation to another nothing” (SW I/4, p. 358). Schelling prophetically
distinguishes between the cognitive — reflexive — ground
of finite knowledge and the real — non-reflexive — ground
that sustains the movement of negation from one finite determination
to another. As a two-sided relationship reflection alone always
entails the problem that the subject and the object in a case of
reflection can only be
known to be the same via that which cannot appear in the
reflection. If I am to recognise myself as myself in a mirror,
rather than see a random object in the world, I must already
be familiar with myself before the reflection, in a way which
is not part of the reflection. This means a complete system based on
reflection is impossible, because, in order for the system to be
grounded, it must presuppose as external to itself what it claims is
part of itself. Schelling will, in his philosophy from the 1820s
onwards, raise versions of this objection against Hegel's system.

Schelling's own dissatisfaction with his early versions of identity
theory derives from his rejection of Spinozism. Spinoza regards the
move from God to the world of ‘conditions’ as a logical
consequence of the nature of God. Schelling becomes convinced that
such a theory gives no reason why the absolute, the
‘unconditioned’, should manifest itself in a world of
negative ‘conditions’ at all. Schelling is therefore
confronted with explaining why there is a transition from the absolute
to the finite world, a finite world which he comes to see increasingly
in terms of the suffering and tragedy it has to
involve. In Philosophy and Religion, of 1804, he claims, like
Jacobi, that there is no way of mediating between conditioned and
unconditioned, and already makes the distinction between
‘negative’ and ‘positive’ philosophy, which
will form the heart of his late work. Explicating the structure of the
finite world leads to “negative philosophy, but much has already
been gained by the fact that the negative, the realm of nothingness,
has been separated by a sharp limit from the realm of reality and of
what alone is positive” (SW I/6, p. 43). The question which comes to concern
Schelling is how philosophy can come to terms with a ground which
cannot be regarded as the rational explanation of the finite world,
because the finite world involves so much that makes no rational
sense.

Schelling's work from his middle period (1809–1827) is usually
referred to as the philosophy of the Ages of the World
(WA = Weltalter), after the title of the unfinished
work of that name he worked on in the period 1809–1827. The work
characteristic of this period begins with the 1809 On the Essence
of Human Freedom (FS = Freiheitsschrift) (written in
Stuttgart). The WA philosophy is an attempt to explain the emergence
of an intelligible world at the same time as coming to terms with
mind's inextricable relation to matter. The initial concern is to
avoid Spinoza's fatalism, which renders the human freedom to do good
and evil incomprehensible. Schelling's crucial objection is
to the idea that evil should be understood as merely another form of
negativity which can be comprehended by insight into the inherent lack
in all finite parts of a totality, rather than as a positive fact
relating to the nature of human freedom. He now sees the fundamental
contradictions of the Naturphilosophie in terms of the
relationship of the intelligibility of nature and ourselves to a
ground without which there could be no intelligibility, but which is
not the explicable cause of intelligibility. In an attempt to get to
grips with the problem of the ground of the finite world Schelling
introduces a Kant-derived conception of ‘willing’ in the
FS which will be influential for Schopenhauer's conception of the
Will: “In the last and highest instance there is no other being
but willing. Willing is primal being, and all the predicates of primal
being only fit willing: groundlessness, eternity, being independent of
time, self-affirmation” (SW I/7, p. 350). Schelling now
establishes a more conflictual version of the structure of the
identity philosophy. The ‘ground’ is
‘groundless’ — in the sense of
‘uncaused’ — and it must be understood in terms of
freedom if a Spinozist determinism is to be avoided. This means there
cannot be an explanation of why there is the finite world, because
that would entail taking the ground as a cause and thus rendering
freedom non-existent.

At the same time Schelling insists there must be that against which
freedom can be manifest — a being which is not free and is
therefore necessitated — for it to be meaningful freedom at
all. The theory is based on the antagonisms between opposing forces
which constitute the ‘ages of the world’, the past,
present, and future. He argues that the world whose origins the WA
wishes to understand must entail the same conflicting forces
which still act, though not necessarily in the same form, in
this world, of which the mind is an aspect: “Poured from the
source of things and the same as the source, the human soul has a
co-knowledge/con-science (Mitwissenschaft) of creation”
(WA, p. 4). Schelling suggests that there are two principles in us:
“an unconscious, dark principle and a conscious
principle”, which must yet in some way be identical. The same
structure applies to what Schelling means by ‘God’. At
this point his account of the ground is not consistent, but this
inconsistency points to the essential issue Schelling is trying to
understand, namely whether philosophy can give a rational account of
the fact of the manifest world. As that which makes the world
intelligible, God relates to the ground in such a way that the
‘real’, which takes the form of material nature, is
‘in God’ but “is not God seen absolutely, i.e.
insofar as He exists; for it is only the ground of His existence, it
is nature in God; an essence which is inseparable from God,
but different from Him” (SW I/7, p. 358). The point is that God
would be just be some kind of inarticulable, static One if there were
not that which He transcends: without opposition, Schelling argues,
there is no life and no sense of development, which are the highest
aspects of reality. The aim of the move away from Spinoza is to avoid
the sense of a world complete in itself which would render freedom
illusory because freedom's goal would already be determined as the
goal of the totality. Schelling starts to confront the idea that the
rational reconciliation of freedom and necessity that had been sought
by Kant in the acknowledgement of the necessity of the law, and which
was the aim of German Idealism's attempt to reconcile mind and nature,
might be intrinsically unattainable.

Wolfram Hogrebe has convincingly claimed that the WA philosophy is
an ontological theory of predication. Being, as initially One and
enclosed within itself, is not manifest, and has no reason to be
manifest. Hogrebe terms this ‘pronominal being’. The
same being must also, given that there is now a manifest
world, be ‘predicative being’, which “flows out,
spreads, gives itself” (SW I/8, p. 210-211). The contradiction
between the two kinds of being is only apparent. Schelling maintains,
in line with the identity philosophy, that the “properly
understood law of contradiction really only says that the same cannot
be as the same something and also the opposite thereof, but
this does not prevent the same, which is A, being able, as an other,
to be not A” (SW I/8, p. 213-4). One aspect of being, the dark
force, which he sometimes terms ‘gravity’, is contractive,
the other expansive, which he terms ‘light’. Dynamic
processes are the result of the interchange between these ultimately
identical forces. If they were wholly separate there would either be
no manifest universe, because contraction would dominate, or the
universe would dissipate at infinite speed because expansion would
dominate. The result would be the same: there would not be a world. If
something is to be
as something it must both be, in the positive sense in which
everything else is, which makes it indeterminately positive,
pronominal, and it must have a relationship to what it is not, in
order to be determinate, which brings it into the realm of predication
by taking it beyond itself. In the WA the One comes into contradiction
with itself and the two forces constantly vie with each other.
Differences must, however, be grounded in unity, as otherwise they
could not be manifest at all as differences. The ground is
now increasingly regarded as the source of the transitory nature of
everything particular, and less and less as the source of tranquil
insight into how we can be reconciled to finite existence. The mood of
the WA is summed up in Schelling's reference to the “veil of
melancholy which is spread over the whole of nature, the deep
indestructible melancholy of all life” (SW I/7, p. 399). The
source of this melancholy is that everything finite must ‘go to
ground’ and that we are aware of this.

The abandonment of his residual Spinozism leads Schelling to a
growing concern with the tensions which result from contradictions that
are also embodied in human beings. The ages of the world are
constituted by the development of forms and structures in the material
and the mental world. This development depends upon the expanding
force's interaction with the contracting force's slowing of any
expansion, which allows transient but determinate forms to develop.
This process also gives rise to language, which Schelling regards as
the model for the development of the whole world because it manifests
how expansion and the release of tension can lead to intelligibility,
rather than mere dissipation:

It seems universal that every creature which cannot
contain itself or draw itself together in its own fullness, draws
itself together outside itself, whence e.g. the elevated miracle of
the formation of the word in the mouth belongs, which is a true
creation of the full inside when it can no longer remain in
itself. (WA I, p. 56-7)

Language as ‘contracted’ material signifier, and
‘expanding’ ideal meaning repeats the basic structure of
the WA, and Schelling insists that, like the material world without
the ‘ideal’ capacity for expansion, language can become
‘congealed’. This interaction between what is contained in
itself and what draws something beyond itself is also what gives rise
to consciousness, and thus to an inherent tension within
consciousness, which can only be itself by its relation to an
other. Hegel uses a related model of subjectivity, but Schelling will
come to reject Hegel's model for its failure to confront the
ultimately irresolvable tension in all subjectivity. Schelling's later
philosophy will present a subject whose origin prevents it from ever
achieving the ‘self-presence’ that Hegel tries to
explicate by setting out the complete structure of
‘self-reflection’ in the other. Schelling's WA philosophy
is never completed: its Idealist aim of systematically unifying
subject and object by comprehending the real development of history
from the very origins of being founders on problems concerning the
relationship between philosophical system and historical contingency
which do not admit of solutions. Furthermore, the structures he
develops lead him to ideas which take him beyond Idealism and make him
one of the crucial precursors of existential and other non-Idealist
forms of modern philosophy.

Schelling has usually been understood as providing the transitional
‘objective idealist’ link between Fichte and Hegel. By
regarding Hegel's system as the culmination of German Idealism this
interpretation fails to do justice to Schelling's real philosophical
ambitions. Many of these insights, particularly in the later philosophy
(1827–1854), directly and indirectly influenced the ideas of thinkers,
like Feuerbach, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, who were
critical of Hegel's claim to articulate a complete philosophical
system.

The differences between Hegel and Schelling derive from their
respective approaches to understanding the absolute. For Hegel the
absolute is the result of the self-cancellation of everything
finite, whose mode of being is precisely to change into something
different. Philosophy can therefore articulate the nature of the
absolute by an account of how finite determinations are always
transcended. This takes the form of the ‘negation of the
negation’, in a system whose end comprehends its beginning. For
Hegel the result becomes known when the beginning negates itself as
being ‘in itself’ to becomes being ‘for
itself’ at the end of the system, thus in a process in which it
reflects itself to itself by becoming other to itself. Schelling
already becomes publicly critical of Hegel while working on a later
version of the WA philosophy in Erlangen in the 1820s, but makes his
criticisms fully public in lectures given in Munich in the 1830s, and
in the 1840s and 1850s as professor in Berlin. The aim of the Idealist
systems was for thought to reflect what it is not — being — as
really itself, even as it appears not to be itself, thereby avoiding
Kant's dualism. The issue between Schelling and Hegel is whether the
grounding of reason by itself is not in fact a sort of philosophical
narcissism, in which reason admires its reflection in being without
being able fully to articulate its relationship to that reflection.
Like Hegel, Schelling argues that it is not the particular
manifestation of knowledge which tells me the truth about the world,
but rather the necessity of moving from one piece of knowledge to the
next. However, a logical reconstruction of the process of knowledge
can, for Schelling, only be a reflection of thought by itself. The
real process cannot be described in philosophy, because the cognitive
ground of knowledge and the real ground, although they are inseparable
from each other, cannot be shown to reflect each other.

Dieter Henrich characterises Hegel's conception of the absolute as
follows: “The absolute is the finite to the extent to which the
finite is nothing at all but negative relation to itself”
(Henrich 1982, p. 82). Hegel's system depends upon showing how each particular way
of conceiving of the world has an internal contradiction. This
necessarily leads thought to more comprehensive ways of grasping the
world, until the point where there can be no more comprehensive way
because there is no longer any contradiction to give rise to it. The
very fact of the finite limitations of empirical thought therefore
becomes what gives rise to the infinite, which, in Hegel's terms, is
thought that is bounded by itself and by nothing else.

Schelling accepts such a conception, to which he substantially
contributed in his early philosophy, as the way to construct a
‘negative’ system of philosophy, because it explains the
logic of change, once there is a world to be explained. The conception
does not, though, explain why there is a developing world at all, but
merely reconstructs in thought the necessary structure of development
on the basis of necessities in thought. Schelling's own attempt at
explaining the world's ontological and historical facticity will lead
him to a ‘philosophical theology’ which traces the
development of mythology and then of Christian revelation in his
Philosophy of Mythology and Philosophy of
Revelation, which, like all his substantial works after 1811, are
not published in his lifetime. The failure of his philosophical
theology does not, though, necessarily invalidate his philosophical
arguments against Hegel. His alternative to the “common mistake
of every philosophy that has existed up to now” — the
“merely logical relationship of God to the world”
(System der Weltalter, p. 57) — Schelling terms
‘positive philosophy’. The ‘merely logical
relationship’ entails a reflexivity, in which the world
necessarily follows from the nature of God, and God and the world are
therefore the ‘other of themselves’. Hegel's system tries
to obviate the facticity of the world by understanding reason as the
world's immanent self-articulation. Schelling, in contrast, insists
that human reason cannot explain its own existence, and
therefore cannot encompass itself and its other within a system of
philosophy. We cannot, he maintains, make sense of the manifest world
by beginning with reason, but must instead begin with the contingency
of being and try to make sense of it with the reason which is only one
aspect of it and which cannot be explained in terms of its being a
representation of the true nature of being.

Schelling contends that the identity of thought and being cannot be
articulated within thought, because thought must
presuppose that they are identical in a way which thought, as
one side of a relation, cannot comprehend. By redefining the
‘concept’ in such a way that it is always already both
subject and object, Hegel aims to avoid any presuppositions on either
the subject or the object side, allowing the system to complete itself
as the ‘self-determination of the concept’. Schelling
presents the basic alternative as follows:

For either the concept would have to go first, and being
would have to be the consequence of the concept, which would mean it
was no longer absolute being; or the concept is the consequence of
being, then we must begin with being without the concept. (SW II/3,
p. 164)

Hegel attempts to merge concept and being by making being part of a
structure of self-reflection, rather than the basis of the
interrelation between subject and object. In Schelling's terms, Hegel
therefore invalidly assumes that ‘essence’, what we know
of things, which is one side of the relationship between being and
essence, can articulate its identity with the other side in the
‘concept’, because the other side is revealed as being
‘nothing’ until it has entered into a relationship which
makes it determinate as a knowable moment of the whole process. For
Hegel, on the other hand, Schelling has to invoke being as something
immediate: this means it must be wholly opaque, and so is equivalent
to nothing.

The problem which Hegel does not overcome is that the identity of
essence and being cannot be known, because, as Schelling
claims of his concept of being, “existing is not here the
consequence of the concept or of essence, but rather existence is here
itself the concept and itself the essence” (SW II/3,
p. 167). The problem of reflection cannot be overcome in Hegel's
manner: identifying one's reflection in a mirror as oneself
(understood now as a metaphor for essence) entails, as we saw above, a
prior non-reflexive moment if one is to know that the reflection
is oneself, rather than a random reflected object. How far
Schelling moves from any reflexive version of identity philosophy is
evident in the following from the Introduction to the Philosophy of
Revelation or Foundation of the Positive Philosophy of 1842–3:

our self-consciousness is not at all the consciousness of
that nature which has passed through everything, it is precisely just
our consciousness (…) for the consciousness of man is not =
the consciousness of nature (…) Far from man and his activity making
the world comprehensible, man himself is that which is most
incomprehensible. (SW II/3, p. 5-7)

Schelling refuses to allow that reason can confirm its status via
its reflection in being:

what we call the world, which is so completely
contingent both as a whole and in its parts, cannot possibly be
the impression of something which has arisen by the necessity of
reason (…) it contains a preponderant mass of
unreason. (Grundlegung der positiven Philosophie,
p. 99)

The contemporary ramifications of the debate between Schelling and
Hegel have been given new significance by the continuing elaboration
of ‘non-metaphysical’ readings of Hegel by Robert Pippin
and others. If Hegel is really the philosopher who insists that
legitimation can only be in terms of the account we can give of how we
came to adopt the forms of legitimation of our society, there being no
extra-mundane perspective on these forms, how far is he from
Schelling's moves against metaphysics in his later philosophy? The
difference between Hegel and Schelling seems here to lie above all in
Schelling's insistence that one cannot reduce the ways in which we
face up to the terrors and irrationality of existence to what can be
achieved in philosophy.

Schelling is one of the first philosophers seriously to begin the
destruction of the model of metaphysics based on the idea of true
representation, a destruction which can be seen as one of the key
aspects of modern philosophy from Heidegger to the later Wittgenstein
and beyond. He is, at the same time, unlike some of his successors,
committed to an account of human reason which does not assume that
reason's incapacity to ground itself should lead to an abandonment of
rationality. This is one of the respects in which Schelling has again
become part of contemporary philosophical debate, where the need to
seek means of legitimation which do not rely on the notion of a
rationality inherent in the world remains a major challenge. Above
all, Schelling's account of mind and world, particularly his
insistence on the need not to limit our conception of nature to what
can be objectified by scientific methods, is, in the light of the
ecological crisis, proving to be more durable than his reception might
until recently have suggested.

Die Weltalter, [WA], M. Schröter (ed.),
Munich: Biederstein, 1946; other versions than the version from 1813
printed in the Sämmtliche Werke.

The Historisch-kritische Ausgabe, im Auftrag der
Schelling-Kommission der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften,
edited by H. M. Baumgartner, W.G. Jacobs, H. Krings, Stuttgart 1976-
is still a long way from completion, but will become the new standard
edition.

Über die Möglichkeit einer Form der Philosophie
überhaupt, 1794, (On the Possibility of an Absolute Form of
Philosophy), Vom Ich als Prinzip der Philosophie oder über das
Unbedingte im menschlichen Wissen, 1795, (Of the I as the
Principle of Philosophy or on the Unconditional in Human Knowledge),
Philosophische Briefe über Dogmatismus und Kriticismus,
1795, (Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism), in The
Unconditional in Human Knowledge: Four early essays 1794–6,
translation and commentary by F. Marti, Lewisburg: Bucknell University
Press, 1980.

Abhandlungen zur Erläuterung des Idealismus der
Wissenschaftslehre, 1796–7, (Essays in Explanation of the
Idealism of the Doctrine of Science).

Fernere Darstellungen aus dem System der Philosophie,
1802, (Further Presentations from the System of Philosophy).

Bruno oder über das göttliche und natürliche
Prinzip der Dinge, 1802, (Bruno, or On the Natural and the
Divine Principle of Things), translated with an introduction
by M. Vater, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984.

Die Weltalter, 1811–15, (The Ages of the World),
translated with introduction and notes by F. de W. Bolman, jr., New
York: Columbia University Press, 1967. The Abyss of Freedom/Ages
of the World, trans. Judith Norman, with an essay by Slavoj
Zizek, Anne Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1997.

Philosophische Einleitung in die Philosophie der Mythologie
oder Darstellung der reinrationalen Philosophie, between 1847 and
1852, (Philosophical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology or
Presentation of the Purely Rational Philosophy).

Secondary Literature

Beach, Edward A. (1994) The Potencies of the God(s):
Schelling's Philosophy of Mythology, Albany: SUNY Press (Account
of the late philosophy.)

Bowie, A. (1990) Aesthetics and Subjectivity: from Kant to
Nietzsche, Manchester: Manchester University Press, reprinted
1993, completely revised edition 2003. (Chapter on Schelling which
characterises him in relation to Hölderlin and to Romantic and
post-Romantic theories of aesthetics, and as a theorist of subjectivity
who does not rely on the idea of self-presence).

––– (1993) Schelling and Modern European
Philosophy: An Introduction, London: Routledge. (The first
full-length account of Schelling in English to consider him as a major
philosopher in his own right, rather than as a pendant to
Hegel. Connects Schelling to issues in contemporary analytical and
European philosophy).

Fichte, J.G. (1971) Werke I, Berlin: de Gruyter. (See
§ 1).

Frank, M. (1975) Der unendliche Mangel an Sein, Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp. (The classic modern account of Schelling's critique of Hegel:
a dense and very difficult, but indispensable work).

––– (1985) Eine Einführung in Schellings
Philosophie, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. (A detailed account of
Schelling's early work until the end of the identity philosophy: see
§2).

––– (1991) Selbstbewußtsein und
Selbsterkenntnis, Stuttgart: Reclam. (Contains a vital essay on
Schelling's identity theory, ‘Identität und
Subjektivität’, which sees the theory as a major event in
Western philosophy).

Heidegger, M. (1971) Schellings Abhandlung über das Wesen
der menschlichen Freiheit, Tübingen: Niemeyer. (Dense and
difficult, but essential commentary on Schelling's On the Essence
of Human Freedom, with material from later lectures by Heidegger.
See §3).

––– (1991) Die Metaphysik des deutschen Idealismus
(Schelling), Frankfurt: Klostermann. (After the positive account
in Heidegger (1971) the claim here is that Schelling is, after all,
another example of the ‘Western metaphysics’ which
culminates in Nietzsche's ‘will to power’. Difficult and
clearly flawed, because it ignores the late work altogether).

Hogrebe, W. (1989) Prädikation und Genesis. Metaphysik als
Fundamentalheuristik im Ausgang von Schellings ‘Die
Weltalter’, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. (A brilliant, but demanding
account of the WA as a theory of predication, which uses the tools of
analytical philosophy to show how consistent much of Schelling's
position is).

Jähnig, D. (1966, 1969) Schelling. Die Kunst in der
Philosophie Two Vols. Pfullingen: Neske. (Detailed and impressive
account of the importance of art for Schelling's philosophy as a
whole).

Marx, W. (1984) The Philosophy of F.W.J. Schelling: History,
System, Freedom, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. (General
and fairly accessible account, mainly of earlier work by Schelling, as
far as On the Essence of Human Freedom).

Sandkaulen-Bock, B. (1990) Ausgang vom Unbedingten. Über
den Anfang in der Philosophie Schellings, Göttingen:
Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht. (Excellent account of Schelling's response to
questions posed in particular by Jacobi concerning the grounding of
philosophy in the absolute: historically detailed and very thorough on
the early work).

Schulz, W. (1975) Die Vollendung des deutschen Idealismus
in der Spätphilosophie Schellings, Pfullingen: Neske. (The
book which reoriented the study of Schelling after World War 2 towards
the study of the later work, particularly the Hegel-critique, and
linked Schelling to Kierkegaard and Heidegger. Difficult but
thought-provoking).

Snow, Dale E. (1996) Schelling and the End of Idealism,
Albany: SUNY Press. (Excellent, very lucid, account of the early and
middle Schelling in particular.)

Tilliette, X. (1970) Schelling une philosophie en devenir,
Two Volumes, Paris: Vrin. (Encyclopedic historical account of the
development of Schelling's work: stronger on general exposition and on
theology than on Schelling's philosophical arguments).

Welchman, A. and Norman, J, (2004) The New Schelling,
London: Continuum. (Mixed collection of essays, including translations
of class essays by M. Frank, and J. Habermas).

White, A. (1983a) Absolute Knowledge: Hegel and the Problem of
Metaphysics, Ohio: Ohio University Press. (Defends Hegel against
Schelling's critique, but does not take account of the arguments of
Frank on the failure of reflection in Hegel).

––– (1983b) Schelling: Introduction to the System of
Freedom, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. (Good
introduction to Schelling's work as a whole, which tends to focus,
though, on its undoubted weaknesses, at the expense of its
strengths).

Zizek, S. (1996) The Indivisible Remainder: Essays on
Schelling and Related Matters, London: Verso. (Sees Schelling as
“the first to formulate the post-idealist motifs of finitude,
contingency and temporality”, which means that Schelling is the
source of key ideas in Zizek which were previously attributed to
Hegel).

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